10 Shows We Can't Believe Don't Have Gay Characters

These days you can’t swing a cat on television without hitting a scattered LGBT character or two on just about any given night. Sundays give us The Good Wife’s bisexual Kalinda while Revenge has bisexual Nolan and Shameless has a gay son. Modern Family and The New Normal offer up gay dads while freshman series Go On and Chicago Fire feature full-on lesbian characters in those ensembles. And of course, there are tried-and-true, beloved lesbian and gay characters on Glee, Grey’s Anatomy and Pretty Little Liars.

These days you can’t swing a cat on television without hitting a scattered LGBT character or two on just about any given night. Sundays give us The Good Wife’s bisexual Kalinda while Revenge has bisexual Nolan and Shameless has a gay son. Modern Family and The New Normal offer up gay dads while freshman series Go On and Chicago Fire feature full-on lesbian characters in those ensembles. And of course, there are tried-and-true, beloved lesbian and gay characters on Glee, Grey’s Anatomy and Pretty Little Liars.

But then there are the shows that should so obviously feature LGBT characters that the omission of them becomes a distraction. For instance, how can an excellent, Emmy-worthy series about a fairly liberal family set in the Bay area be completely devoid of gay characters? It’s like that feeling one gets watching the now classic Fried Green Tomatoes and knowing that Mary Stuart Masterson’s and Mary Louise Parker’s characters were totally getting in to the “secret sauce” with each other at the Whistle Stop Café, even if Hollywood tells us otherwise. The omission just becomes annoying and blatant.

That got us thinking that there are plenty of shows that could use queer characters. Since this is SheWired, we’re positing that the following shows could use a lesbian character (s). And since The L Word’s Shane (Kate Moennig) is pretty much the most recognizable lesbian character of all time, we thought we’d inject her in the following shows just to see what it might look like.

Here are the 10 shows we can't believe don't have gay characters.

10. The Vampire Diaries:

The CW could take a cue from ABC Family with its continual line-up of LGBT characters on shows like Pretty Little Liars, Secret Life of The American Teen and Greek and the upcoming The Fosters. And The Vampire Diaries could also take a page out of True Blood’s script. All those gorgeous vamps and not one sexy gay lady vampire among them? Where are the lesbian vampire queens, and bisexual slayers?